


I Love You, Man

by Myxini



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, F/M, M/M, Unrequited Castiel/Dean Winchester, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-09-21
Updated: 2013-09-21
Packaged: 2017-12-27 06:12:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/975388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Myxini/pseuds/Myxini
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean can no longer deny that he’s madly in love with his best friend. Who just so happens to be taken. And a guy. And also straight. Life’s a bitch, ain’t it?</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Love You, Man

_“It was stupid as hell. Original flavor rom-com crap, falling in love with your best friend. They make it look like fun and games in those friggin’ movies. It’s not. It was a goddamn nightmare._

_“Rom-coms always have this perfect ending, all wrapped up cute and sweet like a box of chocolates. You know. Declaration of love. Kiss in the rain. Happily ever after. I never believed it’d all end like a rom-com. Honest, I didn’t. But man—I hoped. You wouldn't believe how I hoped….”_

\- - -

“Hello, Dean.”

Those two simple words made Dean’s heart fly up into his throat, as they had every weekday morning for nearly two months. He swallowed, trying to crush his pulse back down where it belonged. “Uh, morning, Cas.”

Castiel dropped his satchel on the floor next to Dean’s feet. It was relatively warm in the lecture hall, and he was carrying his trench coat folded over his arm. Dean tried not to admire the lean curves of his body through his blue sweater as he settled into his usual seat.

“I assume you returned to your room at a reasonable hour and finished the rest of the reading like a responsible student?” Cas smirked dryly as he fished in his bag for a pen.

“Yeah, you know me.” Dean forced his gaze to retreat to the chipped surface of his flip-down desk. He plastered on a grin. “Responsible student number one.”

Cas sighed one of his ~~adorable~~ exasperated sighs. “I don’t know what you expect to get out of your education if you don’t put in the work.”

“A diploma, mainly.” Dean shrugged and rolled his eyes. “I SparkNoted what I didn’t finish. No big deal. The prof’s gonna talk about Shakespeare, I’m gonna write stuff down, and we’ll all be happy. Anyway, man, you don’t even understand how insane Benny's party was. You missed out.”

“I can tell. You were so obvioulsy in your right mind when you got ready this morning.” Cas reached out and wiped a smear of toothpaste off Dean’s cheek with the pad of his thumb.

Dean’s heart nearly stopped. He ducked down to grab his laptop out of his backpack and prayed to God he wasn’t blushing. “Yeah, well, where were you anyway?”

“At home. Meg has an exam today. I was helping her study.”

That killed the butterflies in Dean’s heart pretty fast. “Oh,” he said, straightening.

“It’s linear algebra. Heaven knows I didn’t understand a word of it, but apparently, it helps her to talk through the problems.” Castiel’s ~~beautiful~~ eyes shone and a smile played over his lips. “I love watching her think. She’s incredibly intelligent.”

“Yeah, I know.” How could he not? Cas only talked about her every other day.

“I’m taking her out tonight,” Cas said, and Dean felt sick because he swore he could see Cas’s whole face glowing. “To celebrate. She’ll think it’s stupid, but I want to do it.”

Dean swallowed and fiddled with the peeling Guns N’ Roses sticker on the back of his laptop. “She’s one lucky girl.”

Just then, the professor walked in and the whole lecture hall fell silent.

Dr. Crowley sauntered up to the podium and dropped his binder of notes on the table. “Hello, class,” he said with a crooked sort of leer. Crowley was one of those profs with a creepy, almost evil air around them. Dean kinda hated the guy, but at the same, he respected the crap out of anyone who could command a room the way he did.

“I hope you’re all keeping up with the reading,” Crowley said as he booted up the projector. “Otherwise, your next exam is going to be hell. Word around the department is true. I’m not an easy grader.” He smirked and flicked on his laser pointer. “Well. Let’s get started, shall we?”

He launched into some blah-blah-blah about the cultural context of Shakespeare’s early sonnets. Dean sighed and tapped aimlessly on his keyboard. He wasn’t in the mood to listen to this crap, and his mind kept going elsewhere. Mainly to the tiny electric shifts he could feel on his left as Cas dutifully filled up the lines in his black composition book.

They'd met in this very room, almost exactly two years ago, back when they’d both been clueless little freshman in the same intro English class. Dean had sat at the back, so he could play solitaire on his laptop without anyone noticing. Castiel had sat alone, a few rows ahead. As the weeks passed, Cas had slowly moved backwards, a row at a time, until one day he'd dropped into the empty seat next to Dean and introduced himself. Dean had found it kind of weird at the time. But he’d soon learned that that’s just the way that Cas was. Five kinds of awkward with a side of idiosyncracy.

And yet somehow, he was so flawlessly perfect.

They were both English majors. Dean had chosen the track for two reasons and two reasons only: he’d heard it was easy and he figured that a little knowledge of poetry would help him score with the ladies. Cas, on the other hand, truly loved literature. He was an irredeemable dork, who prized his well-thumbed copies of _The Grapes of Wrath_ and _For Whom The Bell Tolls_ and—his favorite—Dante’s _Divine Comedy._ There was no doubt in Dean’s mind that in a few years, Cas was going to be one of those dusty English teachers who muttered to themselves and sometimes lost their glasses on top of their heads.

~~...Damn, Cas would look so hot in glasses.~~

Dean was ripped out of that thought by a nudge to his left elbow. Ignoring the spark of nauseous electricity that blazed through him, he shot Cas a glance and mouthed, _“What?”_

Cas gave him a meaningful look and jerked his head at Dean’s empty Word document. Then he slid his notebook over a couple inches and gave it a tap with his pen. In the upper right corner, he’d scribbled the words _I’m not going to let you copy._

Dean snorted. He typed _I’m taking tons of mental notes._

Castiel let out a soft puff of air—one of his quiet, understated, ~~cute-as-hell~~ chuckles. He reached over and pressed on Dean’s backspace key until the cursor swallowed the sentence back up. Then he gave the spacebar a few meaningful taps and raised his eyebrows.

Dean shook his head. He was grinning, but his heart felt like it was being ripped apart.

He set his fingers to the keyboard and obediently began typing up some crap about the 1600s.

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: because of school and various other things, updates to this fic will be certainly irregular, probably short, and possibly far between. Apologies, and thanks in advance for your patience.


End file.
